Backbone

Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.

His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child’s play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.

There is little to say about the original animus or “motive cause” of the boy’s desire to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. He had been housebound one day with asthma, on a rainy and distended morning, apparently looking through some of his father’s promotional materials. Some of these survived the eventual fire. The boy’s asthma was thought to be congenital.

The outside area of his foot beneath and around the lateral malleolus was the first to require any real contortion. (The young boy thought, at that point, of the lateral malleolus as the funny knob thing on his ankle.) The strategy, as he understood it, was to arrange himself on his bedroom’s carpeted floor with the inside of his knee on the floor and his calf and foot at as close to a perfect ninety-degree angle to his thigh as he could manage. Then he had to lean as far to the side as he could, bending out over the splayed ankle and the foot’s outside, rotating his neck over and down and straining with his fully extended lips (the boy’s idea of fully extended lips consisted at this point of the exaggerated pucker that signifies kissing in children’s cartoons) toward a section of the foot’s outside that he had marked with a bull’s-eye of soluble ink. He struggled to breathe against the dextrorotated pressure of his ribs, stretching farther and farther to the side, very early one morning, until he felt a flat pop in the upper part of his back and then pain beyond naming somewhere between his shoulder blade and spine. The boy did not cry out or weep but merely sat silent in this tortured posture until his failure to appear for breakfast brought his father upstairs to the bedroom’s door. The pain and resultant dyspnea kept the boy out of school for more than a month. One can only wonder what a father might make of an injury like this in a six-year-old child.

The father’s chiropractor, Dr. Kathy, was able to relieve the worst of the immediate symptoms. More important, it was Dr. Kathy who introduced the boy to the concepts of spine as microcosm and of spinal hygiene and postural echo and incrementalism in flexion. Dr. Kathy smelled faintly of fennel and seemed totally open and available and kind. The child lay on a tall padded table and placed his chin in a little cup. She manipulated his head, very gently but in a way that seemed to make things happen all the way down his back. Her hands were strong and soft and when she touched the boy’s back he felt as if she were asking it questions and answering them all at the same time. She had charts on her wall with exploded views of the human spine and the muscles and fasciae and nerve bundles that surrounded the spine and were connected to it. No lollipops were anywhere in view. The specific stretching exercises that Dr. Kathy gave the boy were for the splenius capitis and longissimus cervicis and the deep sheaths of nerve and muscle surrounding the boy’s T2 and T3 vertebrae, which were what he had just injured. Dr. Kathy had reading glasses on a cord around her neck and a green button-up sweater that looked as if it were made entirely of pollen. You could tell she talked to everybody the same way. She instructed the boy to perform the stretching exercises every single day and not to let boredom or a reduction in symptomology keep him from doing them in a disciplined way. She said that the long-term goal was not relief of present discomfort but neurological hygiene and health and a wholeness of body and mind that he would someday appreciate very, very much. For the boy’s father, Dr. Kathy prescribed an herbal relaxant.

Thus was Dr. Kathy the child’s formal introduction both to incremental stretching and to the adult idea of quiet daily discipline and progress toward a long-term goal. This proved fortuitous. During the five weeks that he was disabled with a subluxated T3 vertebra—often in such discomfort that not even his inhaler could ease the asthma that struck whenever he experienced pain or distress—the heady enthusiasm of childhood had given way in the boy to a realization that the objective of pressing his lips to every square inch of himself was going to require maximum effort, discipline, and a commitment sustainable over periods of time that he could not then (because of his age) imagine.

One thing Dr. Kathy had taken time out to show the boy was a freestanding 3-D model of a human spine that had not been taken care of in any real or significant way. It looked dark, stunted, necrotic, and sad. Its tubercles and soft tissues were inflamed, and the annulus fibrosus of its disks was the color of bad teeth. Up against the wall behind this model was a hand-lettered plaque or sign explaining what Dr. Kathy liked to say were the two different payment options for the spine and associated nervosa, which were “NOW” and “LATER.”

Most professional contortionists are, in fact, simply persons born with congenital atrophic/dystrophic conditions of major recti, or with acute lordotic flexion of the lumbar spine, or both. A majority display Chvostek’s sign or other forms of ipsilateral spasticity. Very little effort or application is involved in their “art,” therefore. In 1932, a preadolescent Ceylonese female was documented by British scholars of Tamil mysticism as being capable of inserting into her mouth and down her esophagus both arms to the shoulder, one leg to the groin, and the other leg to just above the patella, and as thereupon able to spin unaided on the orally protrusive knee at rates in excess of 300 r.p.m. The phenomenon of suiphagia (i.e., self-swallowing) has subsequently been identified as a rare form of inanitive pica, in most cases caused by deficiencies in cadmium and/or zinc. The insides of the small boy’s thighs up to the medial fork of his groin took months even to prepare for, daily hours spent cross-legged and bowed, slowly and incrementally stretching the long vertical fasciae of his back and neck, the spinalis thoracis and levator scapulae, the iliocostalis lumborum all the way to the sacrum, and the interior thigh’s dense and intransigent gracilis, pectineus, and adductor longus, which fuse below Scarpa’s triangle and transmit sickening pain through the pubis whenever their range of flexibility is exceeded. Had anyone seen the child during these two- and three-hour sessions, bringing his soles together and in to train the pectineus, bobbing slightly and then holding a deep cross-legged lean to work the great tight sheet of thoracolumbar fascia that connected his pelvis to his dorsal costae, he would have appeared to that person either prayerful or catatonic, or both.

Once the thighs’ anterior targets were achieved and touched with one or both lips, the upper portions of his genitals were simple, and were protrusively kissed and passed over even as plans for the ilium and outer buttocks were in conception. After these achievements would come the more difficult and neck-intensive contortions required to access the inner buttocks, perineum, and extreme upper groin.

The boy had turned seven.

The special place where he pursued his strange but newly mature objective was his room, which had wallpaper with a jungle motif. The second-floor window yielded a view of the back yard’s tree. Light from the sun came through the tree at different angles and intensities at different times of day and illuminated different parts of the boy as he stood, sat, inclined, or lay on the room’s carpet, stretching and holding positions. His bedroom’s carpet was white shag with a furry, polar aspect that the boy’s father did not think went well with the walls’ repeating scheme of tiger, zebra, lion, and palm, but the father kept his feelings to himself.

Radical increase of the lips’ protrusive range requires systematic exercise of the maxillary fasciae, such as the depressor septi, orbicularis oris, depressor anguli oris, depressor labii inferioris, and the buccinator, circumoral, and risorius groups. The zygomatic muscles are superficially involved. Praxis: Affix string to Wetherly button of at least 1.5-inch diameter borrowed from father’s second-best raincoat; place button over upper and lower front teeth and enclose with lips; hold string fully extended at ninety degrees to face’s plane and pull on end with gradually increasing tension, using lips to resist pull; hold for twenty seconds; repeat; repeat.

Sometimes the boy’s father sat on the floor outside his bedroom with his back to the door, listening for movement in the room. It’s not clear whether the boy ever heard him, although the wood of the door sometimes made a creaky sound when the father sat down against it or stood back up in the hallway or shifted his position against the door. The boy was in there stretching and holding contorted positions for extraordinary periods of time. The father was a somewhat nervous man, with a rushed, fidgety manner that always lent him an air of imminent departure. He had extensive entrepreneurial activities and was in motion much of the time. His place in most people’s mental albums was provisional, with something like a dotted line around it—the image of someone saying something friendly over his shoulder as he heads for an exit. Often, clients found that the father made them uneasy. He was at his most effective on the phone.

By the time the child was eight, his long-term goal was beginning to affect his physical development. His teachers remarked on changes in his posture and gait. The boy’s smile, which appeared by now constant because of the effect of circumlabial hypertrophy on the circumoral musculature, looked unusual also—rigid and overbroad and seeming, in one custodian’s evaluative phrase, “like nothing in this round world.”

Facts: the Italian stigmatist Padre Pio carried wounds that penetrated both hands and feet medially throughout his lifetime. The Umbrian St. Veronica Giuliani presented with wounds in both hands and feet, as well as in her side, which wounds were observed to open and close on command. The eighteenth-century holy woman Giovanna Solimani permitted pilgrims to insert special keys in her hands’ wounds and to turn them, reportedly facilitating the pilgrims’ own recovery from rationalist despair.

According to both St. Bonaventura and Tomás de Celano, St. Francis of Assisi’s manual stigmata included baculiform masses of what presented as hardened black flesh extrudent from both volar planes. If and when pressure was applied to a palm’s so-called “nail,” a rod of flesh would immediately protrude from the back of the hand, exactly as if a real so-called “nail” were passing through the hand.

And yet (fact): Hands lack the anatomical mass required to support the weight of an adult human. Both Roman legal texts and modern examinations of a first-century skeleton confirm that classical crucifixion required nails to be driven through the subject’s wrists, not his hands. Hence the, quote, “necessarily simultaneous truth and falsity of the stigmata” that the existential theologist E. M. Cioran explicates in his 1937 “Lacrimi si Sfinti,” the same monograph in which he refers to the human heart as “God’s open wound.”

Areas of the boy’s midsection from navel to xiphoid process, at the cleft of his ribs, alone required nineteen months of stretching and postural exercises, the more extreme of which must have been very painful indeed. At this stage, further advances in flexibility were now subtle to the point of being undetectable without extremely precise daily record-keeping.

Certain tensile limits in the flava, capsule, and process ligaments of the neck and upper back were gently but persistently stretched, the boy’s chin placed to his (solubly arrowed and dotted) chest at mid-sternum and then slid incrementally down—one, sometimes 1.5 millimetres a day—and this catatonic and/or meditative posture held for an hour or more.

In the summer, during his early-morning routines, the tree outside the boy’s window became busy with grackles coming and going, and then, as the sun rose, filled with the birds’ harsh sounds, tearing sounds, which, as the boy sat cross-legged with his chin to his chest, sounded through the pane like rusty screws turning, some complexly stuck thing coming loose with a shriek. Past the southern exposure’s tree were the foreshortened roofs of neighborhood homes and the fire hydrant and street sign of the cross street and the forty-eight identical roofs of a low-income housing development beyond the cross street, and, past the development, just at the horizon, the edges of the verdant cornfields that began at the city limits. In late summer the fields’ green became more sallow, and then in the fall there was merely sad stubble, and in the winter the fields’ bare earth looked like nothing so much as just what it was.

At his elementary school, where his behavior was exemplary and his assignments completed and his progress charted at the medial apex of all relevant curves, the boy was, among his classmates, the sort of marginal social figure who was so marginal he was not even teased. As early as Grade 3, the boy had begun to develop along unusual physical lines as a result of his commitment to the objective; even so, something in his aspect or bearing served to place him outside the bounds of schoolyard cruelty. The boy followed classroom regulations and performed satisfactorily in group work. The written evaluations of his socialization described the boy not as withdrawn or aloof but as “calm,” “unusually poised,” and “self-containing” [sic]. The boy gave neither trouble nor delight and was not much noticed. It is not known whether this bothered him.

Nor was it ever established precisely why this boy had devoted himself to the goal of being able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. It is not clear even that he conceived of the goal as an “achievement” in any conventional sense. Unlike his father, he did not read Ripley and had never heard of the McWhirters—certainly it was no kind of stunt. Nor any sort of self-evection; this is verified—the boy had no conscious wish to “transcend” anything. If someone had asked him, the boy would have said only that he’d decided he wanted to press his lips to every last micrometre of his own individual body. He would not have been able to say more than this. Insights into or conceptions of his own physical “inaccessibility” to himself (as we are all of us self-inaccessible and can, for example, touch parts of one another in ways that we could not even dream of touching our own bodies) or of his complete determination, apparently, to pierce that veil of inaccessibility—to be, in some childish way, self-contained and -sufficient—these were beyond his conscious awareness. He was, after all, just a little boy. His lips touched the upper areolae of his left and right nipples in the autumn of his ninth year. The lips by this time were markedly large and protrusive; part of his daily discipline was tedious button-and-string exercises designed to promote hypertrophy of the orbicularis muscles. The ability to extend his pursed lips as much as 10.4 centimetres had often meant the difference between achieving part of his thorax and not. It had also been the orbicularis muscles, more than any outstanding advance in vertebral flexion, that had permitted him to access the rear areas of his scrotum and substantial portions of the papery skin around his anus before he turned nine. These areas had been touched, tagged on the four-sided chart inside his personal ledger, then washed clean of ink and forgotten. The boy’s tendency was to forget each site once he had pressed his lips to it, as if the establishment of its accessibility made the site henceforth unreal for him and the site now in some sense “existed” only on the four-faced chart.

Fully and exquisitely real for the boy in his eleventh year, however, remained those portions of his trunk that he had not yet attempted: areas of his chest above the pectoralis minor and of his lower throat between clavicle and upper platysma, as well as the smooth and endless planes and tracts of his back (excluding lateral portions of the trapezius and rear deltoid, which he had achieved at eight and a half) extending upward from the buttocks.

Four separate licensed, bonded physicians apparently testified that the Bavarian mystic Therese Neumann’s stigmata comprised corticate dermal structures that passed medially through both her hands. Therese Neumann’s capacity for inedia was attested to by four Franciscan nuns, who attended her in rotating shifts in 1927. She lived for almost thirty-five years without food or liquid; her one recorded bowel movement (March 12, 1928) was determined by laboratory analysis to comprise only mucus and empyreumatic bile.

A Bengali holy man known to his followers as Prahansatha the Second underwent periods of meditative chanting during which his eyes exited their sockets and ascended to float above his head, connected only by their dura-mater cords, and thereupon performed (i.e., the floating eyes did) rhythmically stylized rotary movements described by Western witnesses as evocative of dancing four-faced Shivas, of charmed snakes, of interwoven genetic helices, of the counterpointed figure-eight orbits of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies around each other at the perimeter of the Local Group, or of all four (supposedly) at once.

Studies of human algesia have established that the musculoskeletal structures most sensitive to painful stimulation are the periosteum and joint capsules. Tendons, ligaments, and subchondral bone are classified as “significantly” pain-sensitive, while muscle and cortical bone’s sensitivity has been established as “moderate,” and articular cartilage and fibrocartilage’s as “mild.”

Pain is a wholly subjective experience and thus “inaccessible” as a diagnostic object. Considerations of personality type also complicate the evaluation. As a general rule, however, the observed behavior of a patient in pain can provide a measure of (a) the pain’s intensity and (b) the patient’s ability to cope with it.

Common fallacies about pain include:

· People who are critically ill or gravely injured always experience intense pain.

· The greater the pain, the greater the extent and severity of the damage.

· Severe chronic pain is symptomatic of incurable illness.

In fact, patients who are critically ill or gravely injured do not necessarily experience intense pain. Nor is the observed intensity of pain directly proportional to the extent or severity of the damage; the correlation depends also on whether the “pain pathways” of the anterolateral spinothalamic system are intact and functioning within established norms. In addition, the personality of a neurotic patient may accentuate felt pain, and a stoic or resilient personality may diminish its perceived intensity.

No one ever did ask him. His father believed only that he had an eccentric but very limber and flexible child, a child who’d taken Kathy Kessinger’s homilies about spinal hygiene to heart, the way some children will take things to heart, and now spent a lot of time flexing and limbering his body, which, as the queer heartcraft of children went, was preferable to many other slack or damaging fixations the father could think of. The father, an entrepreneur who sold motivational tapes through the mail, worked out of a home office but was frequently away for seminars and mysterious evening sales calls. The family’s home, which faced west, was tall and slender and contemporary; it resembled one half of a duplex town house from which the other half had been suddenly removed. It had olive-colored aluminum siding and was on a cul-de-sac, at the northern end of which stood a side entrance to the county’s third-largest cemetery, whose name was woven in iron above the main gate but not above that side entrance. The word that the father thought of when he thought of the boy was: “dutiful,” which surprised the man, for it was a rather old-fashioned word and he had no idea where it came from when he thought of the boy in his room, from outside the door.

The father’s belief in ATTITUDE as the overarching determinant of ALTITUDE had been unwavering since his own adolescence, during which awkward time he had discovered the works of Dale Carnegie and of the Beecher Foundation, and had utilized these practical philosophies to bolster his own self-confidence and to improve his social standing—this standing, as well as all interpersonal exchanges and incidents that served as evidence thereof, was charted weekly, and the charts and graphs displayed for ease of reference on the inside of his bedroom’s closet door. Even as a provisional adult, the father still worked tirelessly to maintain and improve his attitude and so influence his own altitude in personal achievement. To the medicine cabinet’s mirror in the home’s bathroom, for instance, where he could not help but reread and internalize them as he tended to his personal grooming, were taped such inspirational maxims as:

“NO BIRD SOARS TOO HIGH, IF HE SOARS WITH HIS OWN WINGS”— BLAKE

“IF WE ABDICATE OUR INITIATIVE, WE BECOME PASSIVE-RECEPTIVE VICTIMS OF ONCOMING CIRCUMSTANCES”—BEECHER FOUNDATION

“DARE TO ACHIEVE!”— NAPOLEON HILL

“THE COWARD FLEES EVEN WHEN NO MAN PURSUETH”—THE BIBLE

“WHATEVER YOU CAN DO OR DREAM, YOU CAN BEGIN IT. / BOLDNESS HAS GENIUS, POWER AND MAGIC IN IT. BEGIN ITNOW!” — GOETHE

and so forth, dozens or at times even scores of inspirational quotes and reminders, carefully printed in block capitals on small, fortune-cookie-size slips of paper and taped to the mirror as written reminders of the father’s personal responsibility for whether he soared boldly, sometimes so many slips and pieces of tape that only a few slots of actual mirror were left above the bathroom’s sink, and the father had to almost contort himself even to see to shave.

When the boy’s father thought of himself, on the other hand, the word that came unbidden first to mind was always “tortured.” Much of this secret torture—whose causes he perceived as impossibly complex and protean and involving both normal male sexual drives and highly abnormal personal weakness and lack of backbone—was actually quite simple to diagnose. Wedded at twenty to a woman about whom he’d known just one salient thing, this father-to-be had almost immediately found marriage’s conjugal routines tedious and stifling; and that sense of monotony and sexual obligation (as opposed to sexual achievement) had caused in him a feeling that he thought was almost like death. Even as a newlywed, he had begun to suffer from night terrors and to wake from nightmares about some terrible confinement feeling unable to move or breathe. These dreams did not exactly require a psychiatric Einstein to interpret, the father knew, and after almost a year of inner struggle and self-analysis he had given in and begun seeing another woman, sexually. This woman, whom the father had met at a motivational seminar, was also married, and had a small child of her own, and they had agreed that this put some sensible limits and restrictions on the affair.

Within a short time, however, the father had begun to find this other woman kind of tedious and oppressive, as well. The fact that they lived separate lives and had little to talk about made the sex start to seem obligatory. It put too much weight on the physical sex, it seemed, and spoiled it. The father attempted to cool things off and to see the woman less, whereupon she in return also began to seem less interested and accessible than she had been. This was when the torture started. The father began to fear that the woman would break off the affair with him, either to resume monogamous sex with her husband or to take up with some other man. This fear, which was a completely secret and interior torture, caused him to pursue the woman all over again even as he came more and more to despise her. The father, in short, longed to detach from the woman, but he didn’t want the woman to be able to detach. He began to feel numb and even nauseated when he was with the other woman, but when he was away from her he felt tortured by thoughts of her with someone else. It seemed like an impossible situation, and the dreams of contorted suffocation came back more and more often. The only possible remedy that the father (whose son had just turned four) could see was not to detach from the woman he was having an affair with but to hang in there with the affair, but also to find and begin seeing a third woman, in secret and as it were “on the side,” in order to feel—if only for a short time—the relief and excitement of an attachment freely chosen.

Thus began the father’s true cycle of torture, in which the number of women with whom he was secretly involved and to whom he had sexual obligations steadily expanded, and in which not one of the women could be let go or given cause to detach and break it off, even as each became less and less a source of anything more than a sort of dutiful tedium of energy and time and the will to forge on in the face of despair.

The boy’s mid- and upper back were the first areas of radical, perhaps even impossible unavailability to his own lips, presenting challenges to flexibility and discipline that occupied a vast percentage of his inner life in Grades 4 and 5. And beyond, of course, like the falls at a long river’s end, lay the unimaginable prospects of achieving the back of his neck, the eight centimetres just below the chin’s point, the galeae of his scalp’s back and crown, the forehead and zygomatic ridge, the ears, nose, eyes—as well as the paradoxical Ding an sich of his lips themselves, accessing which appeared to be like asking a blade to cut itself. These sites occupied a near-mythic place in the over-all project: the boy revered them in such a way as to place them almost beyond the range of conscious intent. This boy was not by nature a “worrier” (unlike himself, his father thought), but the inaccessibility of these last sites seemed so immense that it was as if their cast shadow fell across all the slow progress up toward his clavicle in the front and lumbar curvature in the rear that occupied his eleventh year, darkening the whole endeavor, a tenebrous shadow that the boy chose to see as lending the enterprise a sombre dignity, rather than futility or pathos.

He did not yet know how, but he believed, as he approached pubescence, that his head would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt, inside. ♦

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